Kevin Ducey’s
great strength is his daring. He frequently appears silly, he risks
silliness in his work, and this silliness sometimes succeeds admirably.
Few modern poets have that sense of daring, and it is a point to Ducey’s
credit that he has attained this in his first collection. At his best he
is genuinely amusing, and he writes serious poetry with an eye for the
offbeat, the unexpected, and the peculiar. Yet he also possesses a fine
lyric ability, one that appears suddenly, unexpectedly, and arrestingly.
Amidst the hurly-burley of Rhinoceros, one occasionally glimpses
lines of such unforced beauty that the general welter of cultural
reference suddenly grows still, and one senses that one is reading poetry
of substantial accomplishment.

The
most notable characteristic of Ducey’s poetry is this vast cultural
referentiality. His work loops together bizarre associations, mixing a
group of characters and locations not commonly incorporated in verse. In
Ducey’s world Edie Sedgwick and Stephen Hawking brush up against
conquistadors and Neanderthals, Batman and Tarkovsky vie for place with
Saladin and strip malls, Kerouac and Osiris appear and vanish. The danger
of such an approach is that such disparate materials will spiral from his
control, and sometimes they do, rendering Ducey’s poetry more confused
than controlled. Yet although this wide range of subject and character
occasionally leads Ducey astray, one accustomed to the dreary pomposities
of poetry journals must applaud any poet willing at least to risk, with a
smile, falling flat. When his approach fails, it does so lightly; when it
succeeds, it is remarkably refreshing and impressive.

Ducey’s
skill is subtle and offbeat. He is not a poet of great cadences, and he
will disorient readers seeking solidity: he is quicksilver, with all the
uncertainty that implies. He would appear to be incapable of sustained
Yeatsian force and, to his credit, he does not attempt it. Yet before
dismissing him as primarily a light poet one should note that he is
capable of great lyrical seriousness. Indeed, one is occasionally stopped
cold by the genuine beauty that flashes through his work. It would be
difficult to improve upon the Cummingsesque verbal rush of these lines:

All praise to your body that you are

inside and I hold in my arms

and these places you go when you dream

Beautiful.
Here the poet perfectly matches the breathless and hurried syntax to the
subject matter—the exhilaration of holding a loved one in one’s
arms—to create a verbal equivalence of expression and experience.

Where Ducey is at his most skillful and exploratory is in his
utilization of humor to make serious statements. Employing Richard Nixon,
of all people, to discuss poetry, Ducey amusedly reveals more about verse
in contemporary American culture than have any proclamations by our recent
poets laureate:

Is this our

national—

“the [expletive deleted], still itself

among the [expletive]”

our

national literature?

But look—

is this what—

Look,

we’ve come to?

Longfellow, it ain’t—

No, sir—

But I never uh, I never

liked that crap.

Longfellow
it ain’t, but this is something unusual. The passage above represents
the general tendency in this collection to risk intermingling the profound
and the absurd, the serious and the frivolous, and it embodies Ducey’s
rare readiness to strike out in his own direction. Ducey has ventured into
an uncommon terrain, and is generally assured in its exploration.

His approach has its weaknesses. One is as much irritated as amused
by the intrusive frivolity often evident, particularly when these
intrusions are utterly unnecessary:

Praise to Allah for my love

is here with me tonight.

All praise to GM’s biggest truck

for my love speaks my name

and doesn’t waste my time.

This
fruitless inclusion of “GM’s biggest truck” is symptomatic of
Ducey’s unfortunate willingness to throw anything and everything at his
reader, as though the sheer volume of oddity will keep the reader
attentive because off-balance. There is value indeed in Ducey’s
readiness to shift tonally and deflate what he is building (even as he
erects it), yet the anarchic energies of his iconoclasm occasionally cause
him to force intrusive irrelevancies into his poems. This is a doubly
dismaying occurrence when it distorts otherwise striking work.

Oddly, Ducey’s major weakness as a poet is his desire to be
poetical. When he gropes after poignancy he finds himself on unsteady
ground. Where he begins “Leviathan Singing” with the desperately
overblown

Those pebbles on the beach don’t struggle for position

or do they? The whisper of the ocean may be

all the suppressed desire of an age

...the
reader is likely to reply, impatiently, No, they don’t, and No, it
isn’t. Ducey suffers from a tendency to make overly explicit his turns
toward the serious. When he allows himself gravity without affectation he
is effective, yet too often the urge to underscore his seriousness mars
poems that had proceeded, thus far, admirably. The poem “Natural History
Museums” would have been unimprovable had it ended at the charmingly odd
lines “Um, I said: um— / What is it you wanted to show me?,” yet he
then vanishes needlessly into pointless ruminations (“All my life I’ve
taken / comfort in these long, cool museum / hallways”) and ends with a
hopeless and unwelcome clutch at profundity:

Still,
she was going to show

me something. The sweet trade

of a kiss against

that dark green strip of Cambrian

hunger, these millions of days,

all the aching dreams

of paleontology pressed to my back.

The
aching dreams of paleontology?

Ducey is as
exasperating as he is impressive, yet this exasperation is provoking and
worthwhile. One becomes irritated by his constant wavering between
exquisite lines and profitless indulgences, yet Ducey offers a real
challenge to his readers. Amidst all the chaos, there are passages of
great stability and stillness, lines worth reading several times, and
contemplating:

Osiris,

Lazarus, we know

the gift of sleep

and the waking chant

of sunrise.

O let me rest here,

splinter of light . . .

Will I regret

this time of death

as I did the mistakes

of life?

These
unexpected lyrical passages reveal the appealing skill that flares through
Ducey’s work. His is a strange world, excessively cluttered, but
occasionally profound and moving. This is verse that, for all of the
provocation it offers, is worth encountering.